gastro ./ lower gastrointestinal bleeding
Gastro-oesophageal Reflux, Factors That Determine It And Treatments
By Groshan Fabiola
Gastro-oesophageal reflux is a condition that appears if the lower oesophageal sphincter is abnormally relaxed. Because of the abnormally relaxed oesophageal sphincter, stomach's acidic contents can reflux into the gullet. This fact can also provoke heartburn, and if this happens daily, you must contact your doctor in order to receive medical care and advices.
Repeated episodes of gastro-oesophageal reflux can cause oesophagitis, which is the inflammation of the inner lining of the oesophagus. Gastro-esophageal reflux oesophagitis usually comes with symptoms like a burning or a painful sensation in the upper abdomen or chest, that sometimes radiates to the back, some patients can have breathing difficulties and suffer from hoarseness, and also excess belching can appear.
It was observed that gastro-oesophageal reflux appears especially after eating a large or fatty meal, drinking alcohol, lying down, bending over or bending and lifting. Usually, symptoms occur rarely, but there are also cases when they appear weekly, or even daily.
It is also known that smoking makes the gastro-oesophageal reflux to become much worse.
Gastro-oesophageal reflux can have a great influence in our lifestyle, the quality of our life can become lower. This disease can provoke oesophagitis if you are exposed for a long time to refluxed acid, and also, if oesophagitis lasts for a long time, it will lead to complications. There can appear a scar-tissue that contracts and a narrowing will come in the affected part of the oesophagus. Of course, this is a grave situation, the patient will have great difficulties when we wants to swallow, or he will not be able to swallow at all. He will need immediately medical care, but fortunately, this complication is rare.
The oesophageal sphincter, which is the muscular ring situated near the diaphragm, at the lower end of the oesophagus is functioning as one-way valve. It has the role to prevent stomach contents from flowing upward. When the sphincter is not working properly, stomach acid will flow into the oesophagus. It is not known the exact cause of gastro-oesophageal reflux apparition, but there are a few conditions that surely contribute to this problem.
If the patient has an overweight problem, the excessive fat in the abdominal cavity makes the pressure inside it to increase. That determines the contents of the stomach to travel up into the gullet.
Hiatus hernia is also a problem that can
lead to gastro-oesophageal reflux apparition. The oesophagus remains open because the diaphragm is not closing the lower end, and stomach acid will enter into the oesophagus.
In pregnancy, the uterus increases in size, it presses the stomach ,and the possibility of the reflux to come grows.
You should avoid tobacco, some foods like peppermint, coffee, fruit juices, chocolate and alcohol, and also you must take in consideration that lying down makes the reflux tendency to increase.
Usually, the symptoms of gastro-oesophageal reflux are obvious, so no tests are needed, but the doctor can perform some tests if he has doubts. For example, he can perform a gastroscopy, or can measure the acidity in the lower end of the oesophagus during a 24-hour period. There exists another method too, used only in complicated cases, and that is called oesophageal manometry.
If you want to reduce the risk of developing reflux, you should stop smoking, drink less coffee and alcohol, avoid high-fat meals, and try to lose weight if it is necessary.
If you do not have frequent symptoms, you can treat with antacids and histamine antagonists, no medical attention being needed, but if symptoms are very unpleasant, and the heartburn is frequent, you must go to the doctor at once.The doctor will determine if there are necessary some tests, or if you need stronger medication.
Usually antacids successfully have effect in controlling the symptoms, but if antacid medication fails, the doctor will prescribe medicines called histamine H2 antagonists, and next , if it is needed, proton pump inhibitors. There exist also a small number of cases that require laparoscopical procedure, where the oesophageal sphincter is strengthened. Article Source: http://www.articlemap.com For more resources about acid reflux or especially about acid reflux treatment please click this link www.acid-reflux-info-guide.com/acid-reflux-treatment.htm
The precedence of the factorial operator
Back when I added a factorial operator to my assembler,
the code only applied it to numeric literals because the code that implemented it appeared in the same function as parsing a numeric literal.
I only found the bug when I tried to apply a factorial to a subexpression in parenthesis,
for example,
-(2+1)!.
The fix was easy,
just move the code out of the numberic literal parsing routine rvalue() to rfactor() where the unary + and - occur,
as well as handing subexpressions.
But the fix lead to another issue?how to handle a sequence like -3!.
Should it error out since negative values aren't defined for factorial?
Or should it apply the factorial to ?3? and then the unary minus sign?
I asked the question over on Lobters and a very loose consensus seemed to be that factorial has a higher precedence than unary minus.
I also threw -3! at Wolfram Alpha
(that I forgot existed until I started doing some web searches on the question)
and it also handled factorial before unary minus.
So that's what I went with.
From what little I found on this topic,
it seems that -3! should indeed return -6 as an answer.
It also seems to be the mathematical convention that -32 should return -9 and not 9
(which is that my assembler returns,
as well as Microsoft Excel).
Fixing that issue would require a rewrite of the expression parser.
The Shunting Yard algorithm I use to handle precedence doesn't handle unary operators all that well.
Sigh.
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?I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further.?
I know it was probaby inevitable,
but I still found it surprising and rather upsetting to see that our television updated itself and that we had to accept the new terms of service.
I'm not sure what would have happened had we refused.
Would it have bricked itself?
And what ?service? has changed that required new terms?
Sending back our watching habits to the mother ship?
Watching one more ad ad we turn it off?
Sigh.
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A week of appointments
You would think that now that Bunny was home now that we could relax for a bit.
But nooooooooo!
We had to call today to schedule a follow-up visit at the house.
This follow-up visit is for tomorrow,
then a scheduled visit to Bunny's general doctor on Thursday,
and a follow-up visit to the orthopedist on Friday.
I don't think she's ever had this many scheduled medical visits before.
Nor so quickly.
Geeze.
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A sprung Bunny
After nearly two months from breaking her shoulders,
Bunny is finally released from the rehabilitation center.
Her arms still hurt and she still has some range issues with her arms,
but nothing that requires her to remain in the center.
After signing a bunch of forms,
we were able to walk out,
and with no help,
she was able to get into the car.
We're home now.
I still have a few observations about the habilitation center.
- Everyday I was there
(and I was there every day)
in the main hall I would see a gentleman in a wheel chair.
He was always wearing a straw hat so he was recognizable,
and every time he saw me,
he would salute me and thank me for visiting.
I would always wave back and say, "you're welcome!"
I never noticed anyone seemingly visiting him though.
- Another gentleman I would see from time to time was a double amputee
(legs, just above the knees).
One day as I was aproaching the vending machines in the main hall,
he wheeled over to me and handed me $5 to get him a drink.
He had a very thick accent,
and it was hard to see where he was pointing to,
and yet,
I still managed to not give him what he wanted.
Twice.
I still feel very bad about that over two weeks later.
- Bunny's roommate was a frail old lady in her 90s, maybe
weighing 90 pounds (40kg) soaking wet.
She had incredible lungs though?every time she had her blood pressure taken,
it sounded like she was being murdered,
and it was loud enough that I'm sure everyone in the facility could hear her,
even on the second floor.
It was both literally and figuratively painful to hear.
- The kitchen staff would gladly give out a second helping if you asked.
Did I mention the food was quite good?
- Technically,
to exit the building,
you have to ask a staff member to open the front door.
I was there often enough to see how they would open the front door,
so I didn't need to find someone to leave the building if the receptionist was not at the front desk.
That did not help me if I was outside wanting to get in and the receptionist was not there.
- In the parking lots of the rehabilitation center,
none of the parking stops lined up with the parking spaces,
making for a rather confusing jumble of parking spaces.
While there might have been enough spots for two or three more cars,
because of the mismatching lines and parking stops,
cars would be parked haphazardly in the lots,
wasting space.
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The sounds of silence
I'm at the rehabilitation center where Bunny is rehabilitating her broken shoulders and all the TVs in the place shut down,
and it's suddenly quiet.
Maybe not as silent as Rachel, Nevada,
or maybe when a Las Vagas casino lost power
(talk about dead silence?it was weird!),
but still,
it's eerie.
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Extreme abstract staircase, Boca Raton edition
While Bunny was otherwise occupied with a nurse I took the opportinity to look around outside.
While there,
I found this odd staircase off the side of a path:
I'm not sure what the purpose of such a structure could be,
perhaps a place to sit down?
But there were benches along the path.
Perhaps stairs to Narnia?
Perhaps?
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It's no surprise that the LLMs confabulate what I've worked on
While I am known to some of the LLMs
(link via Flutterby),
my own score
(or ?strength? as the site calls it) is in the upper two digit range.
It picked up that I'm a blogger,
but it also confabulated that I worked on the Apache module mod_python.
Heh ? close,
but no cigar!
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Extreme aviary, Boca Raton edition
Bunny is doing as well as can be expected,
given that she really can't use her arms to get out of bed or a chair.
But she does like looking at the finches they have in the main hall:
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Extreme Kobolds, Boca Raton edition
As my tires were being addressed at a local tire shop,
I meandered across the street to have lunch and browse at some stores to kill some time.
At a gaming store,
I came across this little fellow defending this terroritory:
He seemed very keen on keeping this corner of the store to himself.
I let him be.
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How many English words to you actually know?
From the video ?How Many Words Do You ACTUALLY Know?? comes this quiz
VocabOwl: The Scientific Word Count,
which claims to measure how large of a vocabulary you know.
I took the quiz,
which asks for the definitions of 100 words
(twenty each from a basic list, intermediate list, advanced, export and grandmaster)
and from that,
estimates how many you know.
I missed 6 out of the 100 words
(two from the advanced category, and four from the grandmaster) and so,
according to this quiz,
my vocabulary consists of some 76,000 English words,
for what it's worth.
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Study Solves the Mystery of Why Humans Are Mostly Right Handed
Speaking of left-handed people,
here's a video of why so many people are right-handed.
An executive summary might be, beacuse of our brains and how parts of it specialize for certain tasks.
It's worth a watch.
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![[A concrete staircase consisting of just two steps sitting along side a garden path] This is a bit far from being a starway to heaven. Perhaps the construction workers took a lesson from the Tower of Babel](/2026/06/21/stairway-to-heaven.jpg "This is a bit far from being a starway to heaven. Perhaps the construction workers took a lesson from the Tower of Babel")
![[Two finches in a sizable aviary for finches in a nursing/rehabilitation center] Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep ?](/2026/06/18/finches.jpg "Cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep cheep ?")
![[A life sized and colored statue of a D&D kobold in a defensive stance] He spoke softly and carried a very big and pointy stick to make his point.](/2026/06/12/kobold.jpg "He spoke softly and carried a very big and pointy stick to make his point.")
